Today I am handing over the keyboard to my oldest daughter so she can tell you all about what homeschooling looks like from her perspective. 

Last week, my family started our 7th homeschooling year. It has been pretty good so far. We started a math curriculum called Beast Academy, and it is based like a graphic novel, so it is really amazing. We switched to Beast Academy because we had reached the end of Primary Mathematics. I am repeating grade five math and I think that even though I have already done grade five, the books are really different, and Beast Academy is pretty hard.

My sister and I also started learning Greek and French, and we will start Latin soon as well. For Greek, we use a book called Greek Code Cracker and that is pretty cool, too. I really like Greek because its letters are different but can make some similar looking words. For French, we use Duolingo. It is a little bit different from last year, because last yearI took an actual French class and Duolingo was just a side thing.

My sister and I are supposed to help our littlest sister and brother with skill development. We started teaching them how to do different things. For our eighteen-month-old brother, that means helping him learn how to talk. For our three-year-old sister, we printed out a kindergarten readiness checklist, and I helped her learn how to recite things, sort pom poms, tie her shoes, and other things like that.

Today, for morning time, we made salt dough and sculpted random objects. I made a bowl, my nine-year-old sister made a plate of grapes, our three-year-old sister made a shapeless blob, and our brother ate the dough.

My family has multiple writers and so when I heard that my sister and I were going to be in a writing class with some of our friends, we got very excited. Writing stories and learning about how to finish them is great and reading them is even better. In that class, I hope to learn how to finish books. Usually I write fantasy stories about places that don’t exist, but that is mostly because that is what I most love to read.

We just started learning about the human body in science. Right now we are learning about all the different jobs of the blood. Last year, we did botany and it was cool to see how amazing each plant was.

We recently began the Jesus Meet Me workbook. We study different parts of the Bible, compare versions, look up definitions, write about history and background, and a lot more. It’s pretty hard to do because it is designed for adults, but we are slowly working through it.

My sister and I have started  a blog called creative kids, where we write about art, book reviews, books, creative writing, faith, family, foreign languages, holidays, homeschooling, journalling, math and science, music, photography, and projects. Actually, having a blog was a reward for finishing our previous math books. So far, we haven’t written very many posts, but we will work on it.

I am really excited to do school. This is our Year of Rest. That basically means that we are not doing very many classes and certainly not as many classes as last year! Last year, between me and my sisters we did at at least eight classes, not to mention all of our schoolwork, and my mom decided that it was way too much, so we are taking a year off. Now, we can spend more time with our friends and do more things together.

“I am really excited to learn about the human body, to learn the piano, and to teach my little siblings how to do things,” said my sister, who is in grade four, when I asked her what she was most excited about for this year.

I think that this will be a great year, and I hope that we will learn a lot of things that are useful and fun.

“Ruby Andersen”*

Ruby Andersen is eleven years old. She adores dragons, reading about dragons, and writing about dragons. She has three siblings and is in love with Charlie, the golden retriever who lives next door.

*A name she’s generated to disguise her ultra-secret identity.

SOPHIE AGBONKHESE

Sophie Agbonkhese is a writer, homeschooling mother of four, and a recovering overachiever (who occasionally relapses). She is the founder of My Cup Runs Over, a site dedicated to helping busy women simplify and enrich their lives. When she’s not writing or debugging websites, Sophie spends her time reading, dancing, bullet journaling, reading, gardening, listening to audiobooks, and striving fruitlessly to have a clean house for at least five minutes.